Finding Balance

Balance, Proprioception & Alignment: On Stage & In The Dance Studio

September 6, 2013 by 4dancers

by Emily Kate Long

You stand on a dimly lit stage. The murmur of the audience on the other side of the curtain swells and then settles. The music starts, the curtain rises, the lights go up…and suddenly you feel completely disoriented, like you’re on a different planet. You’re blinded from the sides by brightly colored light. In front of you, the darkness seems endless. Where are the walls? How far away is the floor? Are you even standing straight? How are you supposed to dance when you can’t tell which way is up?

No dancer wants to be caught in such circumstances. If this scenario is familiar to you, your balance organs and proprioceptive sense may need a tune-up. For this installment of Finding Balance, I’m going literal and taking a look at the relationship of balance, proprioception, and alignment onstage and in the studio.

In her book Dance Mind and Body, Sandra Cerny Minton defines balance as “a body feeling of being poised or in a state of equilbrium. If you are balanced, you are centered and will not fall by giving in to the force of gravity.” The International Association of Dance Medicine and Science (IADMS) tells us that proprioception is the physical sense or feeling of your moving body. Sometimes it’s nicknamed the “sixth sense.” In a very simple way, you could think of balance as the feeling of the still self, and proprioception as the feeling of the moving self.

In the scientific sense, balance happens when an object’s center of gravity is placed over its base of support. A larger support base and lower center of gravity equal more effortless balance. To illustrate, think of the ease of balancing barefoot in a second-position grand plie with the hands on the hips and eyes looking straight ahead—wide base and low, compact center. Now contrast that with a balance on pointe in a back attitude with asymmetrical arms and a turned and inclined head—small base, high center, plus a lot of extended limbs to complicate things.

Another concept to consider in the discussion of balance is alignment. Correct static alignment is the stance featuring left-right symmetry in the body from a front or back view, with a vertical line passing through the earlobe, shoulder joint, trochanter head, kneecap, and the front of the ankle joint from a side view. Dynamic alignment refers to the body’s parts relating to one another in a balanced way when the body is in motion. Good alignment is inherently balanced. Essentially, it’s good biomechanics. You could say that proprioception is the feeling of one’s dynamic alignment. (Interestingly, these two alignment terns are also commonly used in mechanical engineering. I love the paradox that we can only appear to transcend the laws of physics by adhering to them!)

One last idea we’ll look at is centeredness, both as a physical feeling and a mental image. Centering is equally physical and psychological, according to Minton. Bodies have a center of gravity (located in the pelvis) and a center of balance (the solar plexus) and the relationship of these two physical centers affects balance. Minton’s defnintion of psychological center is roughly akin to the IADMS definition of proproiception: a mental awareness of what the body is doing as it moves. The key difference is the confidence aspect of being mentally centered. Minton notes that “skill in balancing is tied to the less concrete concept of body awareness and the psychological aspects of center…Body awareness involves having an accurate sense of where you are moving in space and what parts of your body are moving.” [Read more…]

Three Training “Jewels” For Dancers

July 11, 2013 by 4dancers

by Emily Kate Long

I was reminded recently of a Zen saying about the three “jewels” of training: great faith, great doubt, and great effort. None of these attributes alone is enough to make an artist—all three must work together in harmony. This month’s post is a look at what happens when the three elements fall out of balance and ways to restore them.

Call it a rut, call it a plateau, call it a crisis—every artist has been in one. It can be as minor as a bad class or as major as utter creative paralysis lasting weeks or more. Whatever the extent, the feelings of being stuck, going backwards, or wandering aimlessly are frustrating. Frustration often begets negative self-talk, and negativity is anything but productive! What’s a dancer to do? Checking in with each of the three jewels is a great place to start when trying to get out of a stuck place.

Every dancer (heck, every person) has strengths and weaknesses. Some dancers love to examine technique but have a hard time opening up onstage. Some are natural performers but find it difficult to pick up or master steps. Yet, an artist needs a well-rounded set of skills, and he or she needs to be able to call on those skills as required. The good news is that we can tap into creativity systematically. We don’t have to be at the mercy of the muse…it just takes a little self-knowledge and self-listening.

Let’s examine the makeup of the three Zen jewels and how each can work in the dancer’s life.

Great Faith [Read more…]

Lessons In Creativity – Outside The Dance Studio

June 6, 2013 by 4dancers

by Emily Kate Long

Another full-time season is over for my company, and another semester has come to an end for the school. Cue the identity crisis! What on earth am I supposed to do with all this unstructured time? How will I prove my worth to myself if I can’t dance every day?

Ordinarily, these thoughts and worse would be running through my head this time of year. Somehow, it’s different now. I have always envied and admired dancers who could maintain a strong (or at least extant) sense of identity through layoffs. Am I finally becoming one? This installment of Finding Balance is a celebration of summer’s not-guilty-anymore pleasures: rest, leisure, creativity, and study. All are enjoyable, all well-deserved, and all are outpourings of myself. Each creative or restorative undertaking teaches me something I can take into the studio. Each makes my dancing more valuable for those lessons.

One of my greatest creative loves outside the dance studio is drawing. Chance brought me to a facilitated figure drawing session in the spring of 2010, and I’ve attended with relative regularity ever since. My rehearsal and teaching schedule this season finally allowed me to get there weekly (or more, if I was lucky) and seeing consistency pay off has been truly rewarding.

Honing another craft to a level I can take pride in is a gift to myself. Facing a blank piece of paper, planning a composition (or not), capturing the gesture of a pose, examining the geometry and architecture of the human form…all these things are so similar to dance, just translated from three dimensions to two. Sensitive consideration of the tools (the dancer, music or dance style on one hand, the pencil, charcoal, model, and paper on the other) makes for a better artistic product and a more enjoyable process in any dimension.

Showing up to those early classes made me nervous! I was mostly learning on the fly, and overwhelmed much of the time. Being in the company of artists I admire and trust kept me coming back. Now, experience and practice have eased those initial fears. I really enjoy how much freedom there is to interpret what’s in front of me once the basics of proportion and tone are more or less in place. As a naturally cautious person, I find a devilish sort of delight in just slapping a bunch of soft charcoal down on the paper and finger-painting with it. Other times I better appreciate the delicate, faintly oily smokiness of graphite, laid down one gentle layer at a time.

Working loosely without a definite goal in mind is not something I’m usually comfortable with. The progress I’ve made under those conditions offers a few lessons to me:

Progress is directly related to consistent practice. Showing up ready to work opens the door to improvement.
Judging my technique against something concrete (Does is look like the model? Is it at least believable as the likeness of a human being?) is kinder than judging it against a vague set of ideals. (Is this great? Is this skillful? Is this perfect?)
In a class with no peers, I am free to judge my progress against myself alone. My work will never look like anyone else’s, and shouldn’t. That knowledge makes me both more confident in and more accountable for my own success.
Analyzing my work, or asking others to analyze it, gives me valuable information about how to use technique. Observing what feelings drawings inspire and why is so much easier with a little perspective.

What I love most about the class is that everyone shows up because we want to create something that day. We arrive needing to express. We get together enough money to pay the model and a little bit of rent, and we make art. It’s such a clear, simple philosophy of creativity. It creates a working atmosphere that’s open, positive, respectful, and vibrant. It reminds me that such a mentality is essential for every art form, and it’s what I try to bring into the ballet studio each morning.

When I pack up my art bag at 9:15 every Thursday night, I take a lot with me. Pride in my new skills, feedback to contemplate, techniques to try, and a generous mottling of charcoal smudges from face to fingers. I treasure all of it.

Readers, what other expressive outlets do you use to enrich and inform your dancing? Please share them in the comments section!

Assistant Editor Emily Kate Long began her dance education in South Bend, Indiana, with Kimmary Williams and Jacob Rice, and graduated in 2007 from Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre School’s Schenley Program. She has spent summers studying at Ballet Chicago, Pittsburgh Youth Ballet, Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre School, Miami City Ballet, and Saratoga Summer Dance Intensive/Vail Valley Dance Intensive, where she served as Program Assistant. Ms Long attended Milwaukee Ballet School’s Summer Intensive on scholarship before being invited to join Milwaukee Ballet II in 2007.

Ms Long has been a member of Ballet Quad Cities since 2009. She has danced featured roles in Deanna Carter’s Ash to Glass and Dracula, participated in the company’s 2010 tour to New York City, and most recently performed principal roles in Courtney Lyon’s Sleeping Beauty, The Nutcracker, and Cinderella. She is also on the faculty of Ballet Quad Cities School of Dance, where she teaches ballet, pointe, and repertoire classes.

Cinderella Story – Rags To Riches: Asking Tough Questions To Get Into Character

April 25, 2013 by 4dancers

by Emily Kate Long

In narrative ballets, choreography exists to say something. There comes a point in the rehearsal process where it feels ineffective to think in terms of steps or counts. Knowing the what and when of the choreography is just the beginning! When the mechanical information—let’s call it the “rags”—begins to feel stale or imposed, it becomes necessary to work from the inside out. Each role, no matter how small, contains vast riches for the performer and audience. To realize them, the artists has to address the how and why of the movement.

Choreography is informed by a character’s self-perception, personality traits, general life attitudes, and relationship to the environment. These things govern a character’s interactions and reactions. When deciding what intent to use for movements, I ask myself some questions:

For internal motivation, is this a positive or negative emotion?

For external motivation, is this a positive or negative reaction/relationship?

What does my body naturally do when I feel hope? Disappointment? Frustration? Relief? Subtle changes in posture, stance, or carriage can drastically change the meaning of choreography. I have to be in tune with myself and the character to make sure my own body language in a given moment is not accidentally polluting my character’s actions. [Read more…]

Pointe Shoes – The Dancer’s Glass Slippers

April 1, 2013 by 4dancers

by Emily Kate Long

Currently I’m in rehearsals for Cinderella, so the next few installments of Finding Balance will explore a range of topics relevant to that story. For this post, I’ll begin at the bottom with pointe shoes. They are a dancer’s glass slippers, and this is my own personal fairy tale: the search for my most appropriate shoe.

I’ve worn pointe shoes for twelve of my fifteen dancing years. In middle and high school I tried what seemed like almost every shoe out there, then performed surgeries major and minor on the shoes I chose to try to engineer the perfect pair. Darning of toes, slicing of vamps and shanks, re-threading of drawstrings, stitching of sides—so much fuss over footwear! It shouldn’t be that complicated, right?

Towards the end of January I found myself at my first pointe shoe fitting in nearly ten years. After flip-flopping between Freed and Chacott for all that time, I decided to try once again to explore some other options. I had one rule: I wanted to be able to put them on and dance. No fuss, no alterations. After trying on half a dozen or so different styles and brands, I decided to go right back to Chacott Veronese, the very first type of shoe I wore when I started pointe at age 12.

I was nervous! All those things I had been doing to my shoes to “enhance” them had become like security blankets or crutches. I felt like my feet were naked! The reality check was recognizing how much about my pointe work has changed over the past few years and trusting that I no longer need those crutches.

I had sewing help and moral support with the first pair

I spent much of my pre-professional training trying to compensate for what I believed were inadequate ballet feet. I wore “farches” (arch pads, like a padded bra for your feet). I stuck my feet under a dresser for twenty minutes each morning (a terrible idea, in case you were wondering). I wore my shoes really soft so I could push far over them and superficially achieve a more curved foot. Yikes!

Placing undue stress on the distal joints of the foot.

The result was that I never knew where my foot was going to be until it rammed into the floor. Slips and falls over the medial corners of my shoes were daily events. Bunions, bruised toenails, chronic ankle pain… I cringe to think of the gambles I took with the health of my feet, knees, and ankles. I believe that ballet is not inherently harmful to the human body. Distortions (even minor ones) cause injuries, and good equipment and good technique prevent them. I was due for an overhaul!

Re-learning pointe technique in my early twenties was confusing and frustrating at first, but patience and persistence have paid off. The changes have made it possible for my feet to be in control of and in harmony with my shoes instead of at their mercy! I learned how keep my toes vertical and allow the arch and instep to do the bending.

Examples of vertical toes with articulated arch

The ankle is designed to do this job because it is a weight-bearing joint. The metatarsals, phalanges, and the dorsal metatarsal and medial collateral ligaments are not. (Netter’s Atlas of Human Anatomy, 4^th ed., plates 527-8)

Working on pointe in a more anatomically correct way has also had a positive effect on the overall muscular shape of my legs and the structure of my feet. Where I used to feel it necessary to fake a good arch, I now feel confident that the shape and articulation of my feet complement my overall line.

Which brings us to the heart of the matter: the importance of finding a shoe that a) fits and functions well and b) aesthetically matches one’s foot/body/leg line. Our style is partly dictated by our function, our function is partly dictated by our structure, and our shoes should complement both of those things.

To illustrate, here’s a bit about some of the shoes I’ve tried:

Chacott Veronese: My very first style of shoe. I loved them always and let myself be talked out of them time and time again. It feels good to be home! I can sew them and go, and their minimal shape complements my slight feet. They are made with a bouncy kind of glue instead of paste, and need some extra glue before wear because of the softness of the box relative to the shank.

Freed Classic and Classic Pro: I chose these partly for aesthetic, partly for the Pro’s 3/4 shank. I loved the minimal-ness of Classic and the U shape vamp but the paste consistently gave out after less than thirty minutes of rehearsal! Eating through pair after pair of shoes was not a good use of my time or my company’s money. They were loud because of the amount of extra glue it took to make them worth it, which was awfully distracting. My preferred makers were also not always available. Pro lasted much longer, but felt like too much stuff on my foot.

Ushi Nagar: These were professional hand me downs. I liked that they had the same bounciness as Chacott, and it felt glamorous to wear somebody else’s special order shoes. They were a shoe of convenience, suitable but not ideal.

For me, this Cinderella story is also has a moral: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it! I was born with feet that go with my body—not the “ideal” ballet foot by any stretch, but aesthetically adequate and sufficiently functional. Optimizing their work has refined their appearance. I’ve learned to love and appreciate them for what they are and what they do for me. As good workers, they deserve equipment that helps them out and shows them off!

Great Faith [Read more…]

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